We All Have Something To Prove

My determined face.

A few days ago while I was out and about doing my usual exercise, putting my body through the ringer, pushing it faster, harder, and longer, making my lungs burn, and taking my heart to the brink of bursting, a random man standing on top of the hill I was repeatedly running up and down asked me, "Why are you doing that to yourself? Do you have something to prove?"

I looked at the man in a perplexed way, kind of in the way a dog tilts its head when it sees something it doesn't quite understand, I replied "Shouldn't we all have something prove?" He looked at me, but didn't respond back to my question, and I continued on my sweaty way.

For the rest of my workout I keep thinking about what that man at the top of the hill said, "Do you have something to prove?" Do I look like I have something to prove? Do other people see me like that too? Do my determined ways irk other people? I thought about it for a while, but eventually I let it go.

Later that night, as I was getting ready to go to sleep, I spontaneously blurted out, "You're damn right I've got something to prove!" Being in the profession I am in, people are always trying to put you down, or not believe in you, or tell you that you suck and you're wasting your time. I take these comments in just like I do the positive ones, but for some reason or another, the negative comments always seem to motivate me more than the positive ones. I store the negative comments in a different compartment in my brain and save them for when I need that little extra push to get me over the hump, or through a gig, or through a twenty mile run.

I've come across a lot of people in my life who have supported me through thick and thin, but I've also met a lot of people in my life who don't believe in me and try to put me down, unfortunately, some of those non-believers were people whom were very close to me. I guess the message to take away from this is that we should all have something to prove. We all should want to show others that we are competent, successful, and hardcore to the core, and if your a person who feels like they don't have something to prove to others, well then I challenge you to find something that will push you to that heart bursting brink.  Prove it friend, prove it.